Franklin Pierce AAAARRRRGH.

On the list of things no one ever says, you can add "Why isn't there a new biography of Franklin Pierce?" And on my list of things I never say, I've added, "Boy, I'm sure looking forward to blogging about Franklin Pierce." Just doesn't happen.

Even with a truncated schedule, I'm still thrown for a loop by Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire's only president and number 14 on the list of Chief Executives. He's bad, horribly so, and while Roy F. Nichols does his best to laud him in Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills, it's like putting a fresh coat of wax on a rusty heap (and not even that fresh a coat: Nichols's book was first published in 1931). I love that one of the reviewers on Amazon states that this is the definitive biography of Pierce, which is a little like saying you're the best breakdancer in Monaco; there's a lot less competition.

Nichols's book is an artifact of its time, written in a manner that only a few biographers might attempt now. Here's a representative selection, taken from the chapter on Pierce's days at Bowdoin: "For no matter where a college may be, whether in the heart of life or upon remote borders youth creates a pleasure world of its own in which to take its ease. Franklin had soon discovered his. There was the forest with its sweet-smelling shade, its miles of winding paths, its whispering pines with all that charm and mystery which have ever called men to the groves. There was the river with its moods. In the spring it was a furious freshet, often carrying giant tree trunks in its swift course and tossing them like chips over the falls. Always it was fascinating by day and filled the nights with a slow continuous roar which gradually sank into silence in the last few seconds before the boy was completely lost to the war in sleep."

That's only about half the paragraph, by the way. No wonder this book is 546 pages. But there's something lovely and missing now about the way Nichols writes, a florid, over-written prose that's lush to wander in for a while. But only for a while.

Maybe we shouldn't pick on Pierce; the man's obscurity is obscure. While Millard Fillmore has his funny name and James Buchanan has the rumors of homosexuality to keep them in vague public memory, Pierce is just Pierce, one of the caretaker presidents, Northerners who made concession after concession to the South in order to preserve an increasingly cobbled-together Union. Pierce had a hard life, too; at one point, he's the lowest in his class at Bowdoin, he maintains a drinking problem that affected his ability to work, and three of his sons die early deaths.

The most significant of these is his son Benjamin, Bennie, who dies in January of 1853. The President-Elect, his wife, and his son were on a train which derailed; the parents were uninjured, but Bennie Pierce was killed instantly, before his parents' eyes. "It is difficult to express adequately the effect which this...tragedy worked upon the President-Elect," writes Nichols, and I can't help but agree. Perhaps a Pierce not consumed with grief and regret and guilt would have made a difference in the final years before the Civil War; perhaps he would have moved away from strict Constitutionalism to an understanding of what America was supposed to be; perhaps all of our history might have been different.

But it wasn't. Pierce was Pierce, a man forgotten by history.

Mr. Double Hockey Sticks

There are always attempts to rank the presidents, according to any number of criteria: effectiveness, legacy, corruptness, efficiency. And while every historian brings his or her own set of biases to the table, and public opinion polls reveal more about the present than they do history (I recall one a few years ago that had both Clinton and Bush II in the top ten, an indicator of partisan battle if ever one existed), surely we can all agree on one thing:

The next three presidents were awful.

To this point, I'd managed to find copies of each biography in my public library. Since I'd relied on them for the Madison and Monroe biographies (and been unimpressed by them), I've tried to steer away from the Schlesinger series. Up until Taylor, that hadn't been a problem. But Millard Fillmore? Apart from the Schlesinger, the only other biography of the 13th President was a half-joking one.

So it was off to the university's library to find a suitable book, which turned out to be Robert Rayback's Millard Fillmore: Biography of a President, published in 1959. Is it a good biography of Fillmore? I suppose so. I finished it with a pretty decent idea of who Fillmore was, why he acted the way he did, and what effect the New York political system had on both the Democrats and Whigs. But is it a good biography, compulsively readable in the way that John Adams was? No. And yet, it was to be the best presidential biography I would read in the next three months.

Here's the problem with Presidents 13-15: they're so dedicated to keeping the Union together that they do anything it takes to appease everyone. They're called 'doughfaces," because they change their countenances to suit everyone. They hold back the dam of the Union, trying to avoid a flood of secession from bursting out; when it does, ten years after Fillmore takes office, he and his successors are swept away in it.


As a result, the histories of this time are one of compromises, and it's Fillmore who's in office when the 1850 Compromise is made into law. In fact, it's Fillmore's presidency that makes the 1850 Compromise easier to pass, as the slave-holding Taylor was, oddly, against extending slavery into the southwest. Fillmore, however, has no compunctions against appeasing the South by extending slavery.

Five things happen in the Compromise of 1850:

1. California joins the Union as a free state.
2. The slave trade (but not slavery) is abolished in the District of Columbia.
3. Utah and New Mexico Territories are organized under the rule of popular sovereignty, meaning that they'd get to decide about slavery themselves.
4. Texas gives up its claim to some western lands in exchange for $10,000,000 with which to pay off its national debt, accrued while it was an independent nation.
5. The Fugitive Slave Act is passed.

If you know about the Compromise of 1850, it's probably this last part, which polarizes the nation further, and ties James Buchanan's hands when the South secedes in 1860. If you're pro-Fillmore, you argue that he managed to stave off war for ten more years. If you're anti-Fillmore, you argue that he didn't do anything but manage to stave off war for another ten years. It's a rough time to be president.

So rough, in fact, that in 1852, Fillmore can't even get nominated for a second term as president--northern Whigs block him for signing the Fugitive Slave Act and Winfield Scott runs instead. But like Martin van Buren, Fillmore takes one more shot at being president; in 1856, he runs on the Know-Nothing ticket as the candidate of a nativist party that's staunchly against the influx of immigrants, mostly Irish and German, who are coming into the country. He loses.

I have no idea why you'd ever talk about Fillmore at a party, but here's something:

"Millard Fillmore? Well, he's the only president who has double consonants in both his first and last name. Beyond that, he serves as a good warning for parties that campaign on fear, as Fillmore did, warning the populace against Irish immigrants who would take their orders from Rome instead of DC. You can't just be against something--you have to do something, too."

Flipping the Whigs

You have to feel a little sorry for the Whigs when it comes to their presidents. They win two elections (in 1840 and 1848) by putting forward popular military heroes; not one, but both of those General-Presidents die in their first terms, leaving behind Vice-Presidents who are less than faithful to the Whig cause. William Henry Harrison's the first Whig President; his successor, John Tyler, is literally expelled from the Whig Party. And Zachary Taylor, Old Rough and Ready, is the second, and K. Jack Bauer chronicles his life in Zachary Taylor: Solder, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest.

Unlike Harrison, who had significant government experience as the governor of Indiana Territory, Taylor has no experience in the world of politics until he moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In a time when the Presidency is still something that no candidate claims to want (although reading these biographies, one realizes that they all wanted it so very badly), Taylor manages to be so tight-lipped about his beliefs that both the Whigs and the Democrats think he'd be a viable candidate for their party. Hell, until the election he's in, he doesn't even vote.

Taylor's famous because of his experience in the recently finished and wildly successful Mexican-American War. While it's Winfield Scott who manages to capture Mexico City, Taylor leads the American forces at Buena Vista and routs Santa Anna's 25,000 strong force with a mostly volunteer force of about 4,500. It's the last major victory in northern Mexico, and afterwards, Taylor leaves the war to pursue a political career.

As far as his presidency, goes...well. He's more notable for certain facts more than anything: last Southern President until Lyndon Johnson (!!!), last President to own slaves while in office. He's President when the Compromise of 1850 is being worked out under Henry Clay's leadership, but he dies before it's passed (accordingly, we'll save the Compromise for Millard Fillmore).

There's an interesting postscript to Taylor's story. He's killed by some cherries and milk that he eats during a Fourth of July celebration in DC; it's hot, and he gets cholera from them, dying five days later. But some historians dispute this, and think he was poisoned with arsenic because, most likely, of his moderate stance on slavery. In 1991, with the approval of his descendants and the Jefferson County (Kentucky) coroner, Taylor's body was exhumed and samples taken of hair, fingernails, and tissue. The results showed arsenic levels far too low to have poisoned the President.

Bauer's book is published in 1985, and that's the most recent of the next four books. There's a distinct lack of contemporary biographies about the presidents between Polk and Lincoln. There might be a reason for that.

Here's your party speech about Taylor: "America has often looked to military success for its presidents, and often, they've been successful: Washington, Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower. But Zachary Taylor? Well, he might have managed to use artillery to overcome a massive Mexican force, but he couldn't use grapeshot on Senators like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Stephen Douglas. I get the feeling that had he been a more successful president, more of a fuss would have been raised over exhuming him, but, as it were, no one gave too much of a damn about one of our least successful presidents, a man felled by bad fruit."

And something to file under "Encounters with Future Leaders": During the Mexican-American War, Taylor is frequently escorted by the Mississippi Rifles, a group of soldiers led by Colonel Jefferson Davis. Davis marries Taylor's daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, despite ZT's wishes, but she dies just three months later (what is it with the Taylor family and dying unexpectedly?). Davis goes on to be Pierce's Secretary of War, and then, as far as I can tell, he disappears from politics.

Polk Salad

Walter Borneman's biography of James K. Polk,
Polk: the Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, is so well-done and such an effusive biography of #11 that by the end, I was outraged that Polk wasn't on some sort of American money. Surely, a man who pledged himself to four main goals and completed each one in his single term as President, a man who defined the boundaries of America as we know them today (statement valid in continental US only, and let's just ignore the Gadsden Purchase, which isn't that big anyhow), a man who leads America through its first war since the War of 1812, a man who dies 103 days after leaving office having basically worked himself to death--well, that's a man who should be on a $40 bill at least.

Polk's four goals, set out by him at the beginning of his term (March, 1845):

1. Resolve the border dispute with Britain over Oregon.
2. Get California.
3. Lower the tariff.
4. Create an independent treasury.

Here's when he gets these things done:

1. 1846.
2. 1848.
3. 1846.
4. 1846.

To be fair, he does essentially start a war to achieve the second objective. There's a lot of fuss over whether or not American troops are on Texas soil or Mexican soil when they're attacked by the Mexicans. If the former, then it's an aggression; the latter, an invasion on our part. A first-term Whig congressman by the name of Abraham Lincoln makes bold speeches against Polk's war, although the Whigs are generally hamstrung the way the Democrats were when Bush invaded Iraq: how do you argue against the war without seeming like you don't support the troops? Lincoln, in fact, suffers back in Illinois when his constituency sees his arguments against the war as evidence of a lack of patriotism (this should sound really familiar).

Polk's hair is spectacular, surpassed perhaps only by Pierce. The cover of Borneman's book doesn't really do it justice. Here's a photo:



Polk's considered by most (though not Borneman, who seems offended by the idea) to be the first dark horse candidate. In 1844, everyone expects Martin van Buren, the former president, to get the nomination. But the Democrats institute a 2/3 majority rule at the convention, and van Buren's stance against annexing Texas puts too many in opposition to him. Seven ballots go by, and Lewis Cass, pro-Texas, steadily gains votes, but even though their candidate is done, the van Buren voters won't switch. On the 8th ballot, Polk's name is put forward, and he picks up 44 votes. On the 9th, with a little finagling, he gets the unanimous nod.

Here's your party talk on Polk:

"You know, it's interesting how many things we recall from grade school without actually remembering what they mean--like the phrase '54'40" or Fight!' You know it's somewhere in American history, right? It actually refers to the border dispute with Britain over Oregon Territory, which at that time encompassed Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. The Treaty of 1818, negotiated for America by John Quincy Adams, established the border at 49 degrees, but only east of the Continental Divide. Everyone wanted Oregon--America, Britain, Russia, even Spain for a while. In 1827, Britain and America agree to jointly occupy the place, but Polk comes into office in 1845 ready to settle the matter. If we'd gone for 54'40", then the last winter Olympics would have taken place in America, and you'd be able to drive to Alaska without leaving the US. But Polk and his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, negotiate to extend the 49 parallel to the Pacific Ocean, with a little hitch so all of Vancouver Island stays British. It's settled without a war--which is more than he could do with California."

Polk should be better known. If you're reading along and feel like skipping a few from these years, don't skip this one.

And this is connected to Polk in only the most sonic of ways, but I'm posting it nonetheless.

A 24 Year Party

I've lived two lives with this project. The first, visible to you, is that of lazy blogger, stuck in 1841 at the beginning of the Tyler Presidency. The second, which you haven't seen, is dedicated reader, 176 pages into this month's biography of Abraham Lincoln. And I've got to tell you, starting the Abraham Lincoln biography was a relief. I knew that something would be up with this project when I realized that between Andrew Jackson (#7) leaving office in 1837 and Abraham Lincoln (#16) taking off in 1861, we went through eight presidents in 24 years: that's a prescription for mediocrity. The last eight biographies--Tyler through Buchanan--have been like being a terrible cocktail party, having to make small talk with people you'd rather avoid: "oh, you went to Bowdoin? With Nathanial Hawthorne? And he later wrote your campaign biography? That's interesting."

And then Lincoln shows up, and it's like your friend just came in the door: "Man, am I glad to see you--these guys are duds. Let's get a beer and talk."

So: I still owe you posts on #10-#16. And while I'm not going to get three posts per president, as I've tried for in the past, I'll give you enough to make small talk at any cocktail party you might go to in the future.

John Tyler, then.

Tyler's the reason the Vice-President becomes President upon the latter's death. When William Henry Harrison dies not long after taking office in 1841 (and pretty much everyone knows he's going to die once he gets sick after the Inaugural), Tyler steps up and asserts his right to the Presidency. Up to that point, no one was really sure if he'd be an Acting President, an Interim President, or still Vice-President performing the President's role. Tyler's foes called him "His Accidency."

Tyler hates Britain so much that when he visits Niagara Falls, he refuses to go see it from the Canadian side.

Tyler's the guy who annexes Texas, as one of the last acts of his presidency. It's the main thing he's remembered for, and he totally swipes his successor's campaign promise to do so. He also sends Americans to China, gets us involved with Hawai'i, and his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, negotiates a treaty with Britain to fix the border between Maine and Canada.

Henry Clay's convinced that Tyler will be the puppet of the Whigs in Congress, but when the National Bank comes up for re-chartering, Tyler vetoes it, much to the ire of Clay, who leads a movement to expel Tyler from the party. Tyler spends the next four years as a president without a party, and in fact, named his Virginia estate "Sherwood Forest" to signify that he had been outlawed by the Whigs. You can visit Sherwood Forest; in fact, Tyler's descendants still live there.

OK, here's your chat for the party: "You know, the Tea Partiers can talk as much as they like about Obama destroying the United States, but John Tyler actually worked to dissolve the Union. See, when Lincoln was elected in 1860 and South Carolina led the move to secede from the Union, Tyler actually led a Peace Commission to try to prevent war--several Northern states and the Southern states which had not yet seceded attended, and while they put forth a package of resolutions at the end of their meetings, Congress rejected them. Then, after war broke out, Tyler sided with his home state of Virginia, and was even elected to the Confederate Congress, although he died before he could take his seat. He's still the only president not to be officially mourned in Washington."

Up next: James K. Polk, who is actually cooler than anyone else at the party (until Honest Abe shows up, of course).

We're Going to Read Another Book This Month.

It's June here, but on our calendar, it's still February, the shortest month. Plenty of time to squeeze in a second president, especially since the first of the month only served for a few weeks. So let's read Edward Crapol's John Tyler: the Accidental President.

Here's the single most interesting thing about Tyler: he's the first man to appoint himself president. Seriously. We now understand the Vice-President to be the natural successor to the President, but when William Henry Harrison drops dead in the spring of 1841, no one has any real idea who gets to be President. Tyler steps up and announces he'll do the job--not as acting President, but as President for the rest of the term. He's headstrong and independent. This will cost him.

William Henry Harrison on American Time

I'm writing this post in a house built in 1791, or, as I keep thinking of it, during Washington's first term. It's a stone farm house in Kentucky, which, at the time, was perhaps the wildest bit of wilderness in America--some serious Daniel Boone-Cumberland Gap-type stuff going on here.

It's easy in America to be overwhelmed by time. We are still so young, relatively, even if we have a steady presence in the world that other, long-lived countries (such as Poland, founded around 1000 but which did not exist as a political entity at two different periods last century) do not. We are young, we lack--as they say--institutional memory. We create ideas about ourselves as a country that do not reflect the facts: the founders were all Christian, the slaves were better off under slavery, the whites destroyed the Indians without prejudice or hesitation.

William Henry Harrison: he does his work in the wilderness of Indiana Territory, defeating Tecumsah at Tippicanoe and cementing his legend, but only as a vaguely remembered campaign slogan, confused with "54-40 Or Fight!" in a junior high school class. But that historical fact--William Henry Harrison defeated Tecumsah at Tippicanoe--becomes the basis for the first true presidential campaign. The well-to-do Harrison, son of a Virginian who signed the Declaration of Independence and who was born in a plantation, is presented as a cider-drinking, log-cabin-residing plain-spoken Everyman for the Whig voters. And it works. He's elected as the ninth president, defeating the incumbent Van Buren.

He dies a month into his presidency, which is fitting, because it means he is only an idea, which is maybe all he ever was, all any president can ever be to his constituents, his country.

Indiana as Wilderness

From age two to age seven, I lived (with my family, as was custom those days), in Warsaw, Indiana, a town so conservative that it actually held a book burning while we lived there--Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar; I have to admit that it's a little upsetting to think about that happening in the town with my first public library.

And while I don't really have a whole treasure trove of memories--I was in single digits the whole time, let me remind you--I do remember a few things that run counter to the popular conception of the Midwest as flyover country: a barn burning by the side of the highway, an ice skating rink in the middle of a mall's food court, a praying mantis walking along the cement of our front porch.

Small things, indeed, but they remind me that Indiana still holds the possibility of being a place of wilderness and wonder, a place that hangs out in the back of my mind while reading Mr. Jefferson's Hammer. We've gone back in time here, even from Harrison's month as President in 1840, to the early days of America, when Indiana Territory was about as far west as any white man went, and Harrison, fighter and territorial governor, made his fame and fortune. And although nothing as clear as we might like--the Battle of Tippicanoe, which makes WHH's reputation, gets exaggerated, and this is less cowboys-vs-Indians than it is the federal government pitting tribes against each other (and inter-tribal relationships aren't a whole lot better)--the Indiana of 1800 still feels like a place of potential, of danger and wildness, of the elements that make a history exciting.

Another Chance, Kinda

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that "There are no second acts in American lives." He obviously hadn't been paying attention to American politics, because there are plenty of second acts there; even George Washington's presidency is a second act, following the first act of his generalship in the Revolutionary War (fun fact: Washington retires to Mount Vernon after the war's end pretty much convinced he's going to die soon, since all his male relatives passed away early on; he doesn't, and become president).

Martin van Buren is a great example of a second act. 1840 sees van Buren lose the presidency to William Henry Harrison, thereby becoming the first single-term president whose name isn't Adams. In 1844, he's convinced he can come back and win again, but even though he has a slight majority at the Democratic convention, he can't get the necessary two-thirds of delegates because he opposes immediate annexation of the newly-independent Texas. His support collapses, and on the eighth ballot, James K. Polk gets the nomination.

Polk wins, which would shut van Buren out of the Oval Office for eight years except for the fact that Polk pledges to serve a single term. So in 1848, the Little Magician is back with a brand new party: The Free Soil Party. The annexation of Texas aggravates the slavery question: will the US allow slavery in these new territories? The two major parties are both in favor of managing slavery--in fact, early on, the abolitionist movement is seen as a group of crazy agitators--but they keep wanting to push it out west. And while there are plenty of people in the parties who oppose slavery (John Quincy Adams, for example), both parties favor the Union over everything else. Preserving the fragile coalition of states must take precedence.

But not for the Free Soil party. It opposes the westward expansion of slavery, and draws upon the members of the Whig and Democratic parties who find themselves under-represented by their leaders. For the 1848 election, they put up van Buren, as well as JQA's son, Charles Francis Adams for their presidential ticket.

They lose, as you might imagine. You don't have to be a member of the the United States Marijuana Party to know that single-issue parties traditionally don't do so well in American politics. But the Free Soilers do have a major effect on the election of 1848: they take away enough votes in New York (MvB's state) from Lewis Cass, the Democratic nominee and hand it to Zachary Taylor, the Whig nominee. New York's 36 electoral votes puts the victory into Taylor's hands.

It might not have been the second act he wanted, but Martin van Buren managed to decide a presidential election one more time.

Love Story, 1841

What do you say about a 68-year old President who died?

William Henry Harrison died 32 days into his term; he was president from March 4, 1841, to April 4, 1841 (and really, he dies at 12:30 in the morning, so giving him that 32nd day is generous). So how do you write a Presidential Biography about a tenure shorter than the time between haircuts?

I had initially thought about a young reader book (here's a weird thing I've noticed at my public library: there's a kids' book for just about every president, including the obscure ones, the ones they don't have an adult biography for; apparently while some kids are still getting stuck with an assigned report on Millard Fillmore, no sane adult wants to read about him). Then I found Robert M. Owens's Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy. Let's read that, instead, and perhaps if his presidency is uneventful, his life leading up to it won't be.

Stating the Case

I've figured out who the next president will be, thanks to reading these biographies. It's all so clear--I mean, out of the first eight presidents, five have this job, and we really can't count Washington in the list, since there's not really a government to have a job in before he becomes president. So I'm happy to announce that in 2016, the next President of the United States will be our current Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham Clinton!

Oh, wait. You're telling me that after Martin van Buren--Jackson's Secretary of State--becomes president in 1836, that only one other Secretary of State becomes President? Hmm...maybe Hil doesn't have this thing locked up.

But why have we made that change? At first glance, Secretary of State seems like the perfect position to become president: you get plenty of foreign policy experience, you're one of the president's trusted advisers, you're important enough to be the first cabinet member in the president succession line. The State Department website describes the job's duties thusly: The Secretary of State, appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, is the President's chief foreign affairs adviser. The Secretary carries out the President's foreign policies through the State Department and the Foreign Service of the United States.

That's some important stuff. So why do we keep electing senators and governors, guys with single state experience, to run the whole dang country? Perhaps it's due to a desire to start over every 4 or 8 years--to separate ourselves from the previous administrations. But Bush the Elder won on what was basically a four-more-years-of-Reagan platform (I've always thought the Republicans must have regretted the presidential term limit amendment they put in the Constitution after FDR, as Reagan would have won a third term handily), and Gore tried to win on a four-more-years-of-Clinton platform (while at the same time trying to distance himself from Clinton himself). So that can't be the whole reason.

Perhaps it's due to the idea that we're less regionally defined now. This seems odd to write in the era of red-state-blue-state politics, but after slavery (and it's worth pointing out that Buchanan, the president right before Lincoln, is the last SoS to become president), we no longer think too much about a president who represents our region of the country--that's how you get Vermonters voting for an Arkansan and Alaskans voting for a Texan. So maybe the SoS was the guy who, by virtue of focusing on foreigners, was free of the regional stain--which is how a New Yorker like van Buren could appeal--for a single election cycle, anyway--to the slaveholding Southern Jacksonites.

So, Hillary, good luck. While the State job is an impressive line on the resume, it's not the growth position it once was.

Party Animal

I used to think that Martin van Buren's lasting contribution to American life was the phrase "OK," having been taught in grade school that it came from one of his nicknames: "Old Kinderhook."

Well, that and this:



Van Buren's a punchline, an answer to a trivia question; he's shorthand for "obscure president." And yet, if what I'm reading is right, Martin van Buren has more of a lasting effect on American politics than anyone between Jefferson and Lincoln. Van Buren, you see, invents the political party.

The Little Magician (along with "The Red Fox"; let's put it out there: van Buren has the best nicknames of any president) is one of the main developers of the Democratic Party in New York. Why New York? Because New York's the first state to extend the vote to non-landowning white males. So suddenly, controlling politics can't be the province of a few back-room deals, and the ideal of the founding fathers--no permanent political parties--goes out the window because there are literally thousands of new voters. Parties are a means of wrangling them, and van Buren's the one behind it.

So: Republican vs Democrat, Whig vs Free Soil, Know-Nothing vs Tea--it can all be traced back to van Buren. Whether we should be pleased by that, I'm not sure.

"So Everything Went Wrong."

As a transplant to the Commonwealth, I'm always excited to see Virginia in the news, which it's been recently for any number of reasons, mostly not good. Our new Attorney General, one Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II (side note: when did "Jr." go out of style?) has filed a lawsuit against the federal government and its brand-new health care law, arguing that people who don't choose to buy health insurance aren't participating in interstate commerce (which the federal government has the power to regulate) and therefore aren't under the control of the federal government.

To wit: "The health care reform bill, with its insurance mandate, creates a conflict of laws between the federal government and Virginia. Normally, such conflicts are decided in favor of the federal government, but because we believe the federal law is unconstitutional, Virginia’s law should prevail."

I kept waiting in the days after the announcement of the suit (and the other states' suit) for someone to bring up Andrew Jackson and the Nullification Crisis. Perhaps liberals were too busy high-fiving each other and conservatives were too busy making up Thomas Jefferson quotations to delve into another situation in which a state butted up against the federal government.

Here's a seventh-grader's explanation of the crisis:

"In 1828, Congress passed a tariff. The New England manufacturers had a great plan for the tariff. Now New England could raise prices to sell out imported products (stuff from a different country). Then the southern planters didn't want to pay extra for manufactured goods. So Vice President Calhoun stepped in and said, “We don't have to pay.” So everything went wrong. Then two years later, on April 13, 1830, the Southerners held a dinner for states’ rights. At the dinner, a series of toasts were made. One of the toasts were made by Jackson. He stood up and said for his toast, “Our union must be preserved next to our liberty.” Then Congress lowered the prices of manufacturers’ goods but the Southerners refused it. So in 1833, Jackson got Congress to pay the Force Bill. The Force Bill gave power to the government to use the army and the navy if needed to enforce federal law. A compromise tariff was passed and accepted by South Carolina, the state that threatened to secede. Then the nullification crisis ended."

Here's Meacham on the crisis:

"After the nullification vote in November, Jackson was embarking on perhaps the most delicate mission of his life--how to preserve the Union without appearing so tyrannical and power-hungry that other Southern states might join with South Carolina, precipitating an even graver crisis that could lead to the secession of several states."

It works--the Union stays together for almost another 30 years. But Jackson is vilified in the media; cartoons appear of him wearing a crown, referring to him as "King Andrew" (I assume that this is because neither Hitler nor the Joker exist yet). And when he pulls the deposits out of the Bank of America in favor of a system of smaller banks, he's censured by the Senate, the first time it's ever happened in the 60 years of the country, and he spends the rest of his life trying (and eventually succeeding at) reversing it.

Jackson's a Democrat, maybe the first real one, and he realizes what the Democrats have always realized: that a strong federal government strengthens America, and a strong federal government will always be accused of tyranny. The Whigs and Republicans, as we'll see, campaign on the idea of states' rights and a small federal government, but from Jefferson to Bush, once they take power, they expand the executive branch's reach more and more.

Man of Style

Look, I'm a narrative junkie as much as the next guy, maybe even more so. And I don't think I'm spoiling anything by pointing out that American Lion is a much more exciting book to read than the chosen Van Buren biography mostly because Meacham tells it as a story, quoting so often from letters that it reads sometimes as spoken dialogue (although, honestly, you could probably tell that just from a comparison of the titles).

So I feel a little bad to complain about Meacham's style, especially when I go back to the book itself and realize that he doesn't commit the offense nearly as much as I remembered him doing. Then again, the offense (which I'll reveal in the next paragraph) happened enough that I regarded it as one of the dominant features of the book.

Here it is, from page 176, the end of chapter 12:

"John Quincy Adams was preparing for a trip when word arrived of the mass resignations. Calling it the "explosion at Washington," Adams reported to his son that "people stare--and laugh--and say, what next?"

"It was a good question."

And here it is again, from page 320, the end of chapter 31:

"The great room seemed, for a moment, filled with flakes of snow. It had been a spectacular, enchanting day--of family ties and affection and gifts and grace. But like the snowball skirmish, which Mary Rachel found "exhilarating and inspiring" though "provokingly brief," the day was soon over. Emily saw the guests out, and the tired children were tucked into bed upstairs.

"She would be dead within the year."

Meacham doesn't end all his chapters this way--not even half of them--and yet that style, ending the chapter with a kicker sentence, dun dun DUN!, feels forced, like Meacham's trying to drive as much narrative as possible into his book. And while American Lion's ultimately a very readable book (something it shares with fellow Pulitzer winner John Adams), it shouldn't have to resort to such Saturday-melodramatics.

Lucky Number Eight?

The wheels of this project grind on, and as we move from Founding Fathers to the Great Blank Space Between Jackson and Lincoln, you can keep up by reading our next selection: Joel H. Sibley's Martin van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics, our next presidential biography.

A funny story about the selection process for this book: when it's possible, I check out both my school's copy and the public library's copy of a book, so that E and I can both read at the same time. It's worked fine up until this point. But while I checked out the public library's copy of Sibley's book, I managed to check out Donald Cole's 1984 biography Martin van Buren and the American Political System. I didn't notice this for a month.

That's not exactly Marx Brother-level hysterics, but it should, if nothing else, give you an idea of van Buren's major contribution to American history.

Celebrity Presidential Rehab

If you've kept up with this (tragically underposted) blog, then it's probably not a stretch for you to imagine me as the kind of kid who would ask people who their favorite president was. This is the reason why whenever I think of Andrew Jackson, I think of my mother, who named him as her favorite president back when I was six or so.

This doesn't jive with my contemporary understanding of my mother, though--the mother who, along with my father, drove me and my little sister out West to visit pueblos and powwows, who, when she and my father visited me last month, picked
The National Museum of the American Indian as her number one sight to see in DC, a town she hadn't been to since 1981.

And if you've read or listened to Sarah Vowell on the subject, you know the problem of Andrew Jackson and Indian Removal. More than any president, we associate Jackson with the stealing of American lands. He's the guy on the $20 bill, but he's the original Great White Father, the man who states in his second annual message to Congress that "toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people."

Or, in other words, demolish their way of life in order to make them more like us.

So, cue the music: how do you solve a problem like Andrew Jackson?

Jon Meacham gives it the old college try in American Lion, which attempts (and, given its success, Pulitzer and all that, succeeds) to rehabilitate Jackson into a man for whom the Union was paramount, trumping all concerns--even those of the humanitarian sort.

Meacham writes that "in the hierarchy of Jackson's concerns, the sanctity of the Union outranked any other consideration. As long as the Indians were in the heart of the nation, they were threats--and as threats they had to be removed."

Does this work? Does framing a pretty atrocious act (Indian Removal) within the larger good (preserving the Union) count as a way of rescuing a president from the Bad list? We won't read about FDR until September of 2011, but does the general idea of protecting America from attack justify the specific idea of putting American citizens in internment camps? We won't read GWB until August of 2012, but does the general idea of protecting America from attack justify torture?

I've thought before that writing a biography is an act of love. But now I wonder what kind of love it is: is it the kind of love a child has for a parent--Daddy can do no wrong--or the kind of love a spouse has for his/her partner--I love you despite your flaws?

Skipping Over Some Ugly Details

You know you're in biographical trouble when your author starts the paragraph on your presidency this way: "It may confound some readers that biography of any American president should devote only a single chapter to his administration. Nevertheless, such brevity seems appropriate for John Quincy Adams."

Yikes. That can't be a good sign.

Nagel's right, of course: Adams does not have a good presidency by any standard (even that of his father, who, until his son matched him, was the only single-term president). What is significant about JQA's term in office is how it ends: with what we can accurately call the first real presidential campaign. In the elections leading up to 1828, candidates were generally expected to avoid campaigning--to see the idea of being elected as a noble calling that they passively received, a burden borne by those chosen. Their supporters, on the other hand, felt free to go after the other candidates with knives sharpened.

In 1828, Adams (who lost the popular vote but won in the House of Representatives) ran against the man he'd simultaneously lost to and beaten in 1824: General Andrew Jackson. Jackson, wildly popular as the winner of the Battle of New Orleans, had won the popular vote in 1824. Adams's crew went after him with vigor; not only did they accuse him of executing deserters and killing men in duels (which was, um, true), but they also went after Jackson's wife, Rachel. They accused the couple of committing bigamy, since Rachel was technically still married to another man when she and Jackson were wed (the divorce went through later, and the Jacksons had a second marriage performed to try to make up for it, although that never stopped the gossip).

The stress and strain of the campaign took its toll on both Jackson and his wife, and in the latter's case, it actually proved fatal; Rachel Jackson died in December of 1828, one month after her husband finally won the presidency.

The founding fathers feared political parties, seeing them as unnecessarily divisive. But the presidents who followed them, especially JQA, Jackson, and Van Buren--develop the idea of political party towards what it is today.

On Tour, He's at Home

One of the things I like about this project is the chance it gives me to think about American history as a thing that happens in a place; since four of the first five presidents were Virginians, as am I right now, I've taken the opportunity to go to the same places they went (Monroe's Ashlawn-Highland, you're next). There's a certain frisson I feel as a history dork when I look into the room at Mount Vernon where Washington entertained Jefferson, or look at the blots of ink on the floor of James Madison's office.

I haven't been able to do that with either Adams, though, since Boston's a little too far away to get to on a day trip, and most of our weekends are spent trying to catch up with the week. So I was pleased to get the chance to visit this John Quincy Adams site:



If you're a fan of international typefaces, you'll recognize these signs as Berlin city streets, and this intersection--not too far from Unter den Linden, one of the great streets of Europe, and even closer to an H&M, one of the great European department stores (their collaboration with Sonia Rykiel covered a massive, several hundred feet tall building in Potsdamer Platz).

We were there because of a single paragraph in Nagel's biography, referring to Louisa Adams's difficulties in pregnancy; not long after their arrival in Prussia, where JQA would serve as the American Ambassador, she miscarried. Nagel writes: "To comfort his wife, John began a search for an apartment more convenient and comfortable where she could feel at home. He found one near the Brandenburg Gate, with a landlord who played an overpowering game of chess. Eventually, they would move again, this time to the corner of Frederic and Behren Streets."

So there we were, at that same intersection. It was raining, and cold, rush hour in Berlin, and for some reason I was only wearing a single mitten (I hadn't lost its mate, but nevertheless, just had one on). And part of me wondered: here we were, a pair of Americans on a grand tour of Europe (we'd continue on from Berlin to Munich, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Kobarid, and Rome), and we were finding a spot where another pair of Americans had been. Was this the historical equivalent of finding the McDonald's near the Spanish Steps or the Hard Rock Cafe on the Via Veneto? After all, Berlin is a city with enough layers of history to overwhelm (in a way, that's what I like about it). Napoleon and Hitler had both walked through the Brandenburg Gate, but we were more interested in one of our own, a minor president.



Too much to consider, and too rainy that day. We went off in search of Haribo instead.

A Subtle Shift

What's unusual about this picture?



For starters, it's a photograph. That's a new thing. In fact, John Quincy Adams is the first president for whom we've got photographic evidence. The first five presidents: only paintings, which are never quite as mimetic as we'd like them to be. Even when a painter is as faithful as possible to the sitter's appearance, he or she still can't quite replicate the real thing. But a photograph--that's different.

It's appropriate that John Quincy Adams is our first president to be captured by the new technology--our first president for whom we've got a "real" picture. That's because he's also the first president whose entire life we can trace. He's born to a famous father (or at least a father who will be famous soon, and keeps his own diary), and, at the age of 11, starts his own diary, which he keeps off and on (like everyone else with a diary) for the rest of his long, illustrious life.

And there may not be a president who's so involved in the beginning of the Republic. Take a look at what he does during, say, the first sixty years of the United States:

--Washington appoints him (at age 26!) to be the Ambassador to the Netherlands.
--Adams (his father) appoints him to be the Ambassador to Prussia.
--Jefferson doesn't want him for his administration, so JQA becomes a Senator from Massachusetts.
--Madison appoints him as the Ambassador to Russia and later the United Kingdom.
--Monroe names him his Secretary of State. In fact, the Monroe Doctrine is written by Adams.
--Jackson defeats JQA in the election of 1830. Adams sits out two years, then runs for and wins a seat in the House, representing Massachusetts. He's there for seventeen years, through the Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, and Polk administrations. He collapses in the House during a vote on commemorating the Mexican-American War and dies a few days later.

From President #1 to President #11, John Quincy Adams is involved in the government of the United States (including a term as President #6). In a sense, his story is the story of the beginning of the country. It's a wonder that Nagel's book is only 419 pages.

In case you haven't noticed...

...we're behind. Well behind. As in, just starting to write about President #6 when we should be on President #10 (although, if nothing else, I'm keeping up with the reading).

So, in order to remedy the situation, I hereby announce the Inaugural (because nothing's "annual" until the second year) From George to Barack Post-Presidents' Day Post-a-Thon Extravaganza! A week's worth of daily postings, taking us through Adams and Jackson into the wilderness of the mid-19th century's parade of Ol' What's-His-Names. Follow along as you recuperate from your shopping hangover.

The Gentlemen From Virginia and Colorado

I feel bad for Gary Hart.

It's been 23 years since he told reporters that anyone who cared to tail him could, that "they'd be very bored," only to have a photo of him and Donna Rice splashed on the front pages of newspapers around the country, demolishing his presidential bid and sending Michael Dukakis into the lead for the Democratic nomination (and there's a historical "what if?" for you).

I feel bad for Hart not for his infidelity or scandal, or even for the fact that he was dumb enough to challenge the press when he knew he was doing wrong, but rather for the fact that he's gone on to better things. He's served on the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism, which suggested a number of policy changes three years before September 11th, and he continues to advocate for more responsible energy usage and policies. He's stayed active enough in politics to have been discussed as a member of a theoretical John Kerry cabinet ("what if?" #2). And, of course, he wrote a biography of James Monroe.

I feel bad that despite the fact that he bounced back from a potentially career-killing moment, when I search for "James Monroe Gary Hart" on Google Images so that I can post a picture of the book for this blog, the page that comes up still results in no fewer than three pictures of Donna Rice (two of the famous photo of her on Hart's lap and a swimsuit shot).

It's probably worth thinking about Hart's role as a politician in writing his biography; unlike the four previous authors, his day job isn't historian. And while it's certainly easy enough to hear echoes of modern-day politics in the biographies of the Founding Fathers (the Argus being the Fox News of its day), it's Hart thinking as a politician who makes the first explicit connection I've seen to contemporary politics.

Like Frost's "The Road Not Taken," the Monroe Doctrine is an important piece of American Writing that's almost always misunderstood. You know how Frost ends his poem with "I took the road less traveled by / and that has made all the difference" (click the link if the last time you heard it was high school graduation)? Everyone loves that part! It's inspiring! "Go, young people, and follow your dreams!"

Very few people ever put the end of the second stanza on a t-shirt: "though as for that the passing there / had worn them really about the same," probably because the implication--neither road is really less traveled than the other, and they're pretty much the same road, just going in different directions--carpes a lot less diem.

Hart argues that American politics misreads the Monroe Doctrine like a sophomore waiting for the bell--we've remembered the memorable, exciting, back-the-fuck-off-Europe part, and skipped the middle stanzas. Hart points out that the Monroe Doctrine is reciprocal--not only does it state that Europe should stay out of the Western Hemisphere, it also states that America will stay out of Europe's affairs. It's not so much an assertion of power as it is a still-newborn country trying to keep its turf. Here's Hart: "Speaking today, Monroe might have reduced his foreign policy principles to a single premise: we will resist hegemony without seeking hegemony."

OK, not bad. We've been misreading it. Hart, however, starts calling out people. Here's the end of the book's penultimate chapter: "the saliency of the Monroe Doctrine in the twenty-first century is now being tested in a highly convoluted fashion. President George W. Bush's effort to expand the reach of the doctrine globally represents a radical departure from Monroe's original intent in two important ways: first, it extends U.S. hegemony from the Western Hemisphere to the entire globe; and, second, it shifts from U.S. rejection of European colonization in the Western Hemisphere to U.S. imposition of its values everywhere. Where Monroe sought to protect fledgling South American republics from European intrusion, Bush stands Monroe's doctrine on its head by extending a form of democratic imperialism into the far corners of the planet."

And here's the kicker:

"James Monroe would be the first to say that America as empire is no longer America as republic."

That's some gloves-off biographin' there. In a time when both parties seek to present themselves as the heirs of 1776, putting words in the mouth of a guy who's been dead since 1831 seems risky. But Hart, unlike the other biographers (so far), hasn't been afraid to point out how America as a political entity had shifted from the time of his subject to now. At this point, that is the road less traveled by.